No reason given. I know they’ve tightened up a lot on what they call “aggressive following/unfollowing”. I follow fairly aggressively, and unfollow in a “bulk” fashion on a very ad-hoc basis… but not sure, really. Certainly, I stay within “limits” and such. And while they continue with the nonsense of the Suggested User List, giving airheads like the Kardashian family many thousands of un-earned followers per day, I don’t apologize for my efforts to find followers by “aggressive” means. It’s all a big joke.

That said, I don’t hold the controls; they do, and my days may be over. Certainly, they may never explain themselves and I will never be the wiser for it. That’s what you get with Twitter… it’s so big that it almost deserves to be categorized under “global communications infrastructure” but it’s privately owned and they make up the rules as they go along. Not like there’s an ombudsman to appeal to!

I have the some concerns over Google, not least because I am so comprehensively a user of their services.

Also, your tweets are still in my Google Reader RSS feed 🙂 Just thought that was a quirk.I wonder if that’s cos google stores them or because twitter has left the RSS accessible and just hidden the twitter.com/user page…

Sorry to hear that Alister!
Hope you get that sorted out soon, I am missing exchanging tweets with you 😉 If you need a Twitter character reference, you can use me, for what it is worth 😉 SY
PS S.K. Alister has 100000+ Twitter followers, not so easy to just start over with a fresh account!

Dude, you totally hit the nail on the head with “same concerns over Google”. It is freaking scary with Google. I must admit: their services & products are superior to anything else in the information world on this planet, and so I continue to use them & depend on them for more and more everyday, and when I contemplate this, it does feel a little scary, because when it comes to governments now, you have close to zero privacy as a person, depending on how much “personal” stuff you discuss in your emails, write in unshared private Google Docs, etc etc. It’s all insane, but I guess the other side of the coin is: you can think, “what the hell…this is me, with all my mistakes/sins, scars, fears, paradoxes, and great achievements; if the government or even the whole world knows it all one day…whatever”. A little bravery. 🙂

For those of you who got their Twitter accounts suspended for aggressive following/unfollowing, I’d love to know exactly what you had been doing… how many follows and unfollows a day? hundreds? thousands? Since I’ve never seen Twitter spell out what numbers trigger a red flag for them, it would be great to better understand how they interpret “aggressive”.

Sorry to hear your account was suspended. Did you ever get it back? Would you mind telling us how many followings you were churning through each day? I think that everyone with a more than modest following uses some techniques. Twitter’s idea that you should only use following if you are interested is unrealistic. If they actually believed that, they would restrict all followings to 200 users.

The problem with the “clamping down” is that they don’t actually define the limits of “aggressive following”. Some accounts seem to have been suspended for doing very little, whereas some bigger names can behave however they want. This clampdown also cements the early users who used these techniques as ‘untouchable’, and makes it very difficult for those who come later to join them with big followings. Of course Twitter do need to do something about spam, but I’d prefer them to concentrate on eliminating users who just republish the RSS feeds of others to look as if they have something to say. If you’re taking time to write about a certain topic regularly, I think it’s fair to actively look for a following.

Alister, This has to be an opportunity for another social network or similar service (there are actually many) to offer some sort of redundancy service.

I wonder if someone has an app that could collect and store all my 17000 twitter account followings and the underlying information, Then easily reconstitute it or have followers switch to it automatically when twitter fails me.

Through casual network collaboration I have make some genuine friends on twitter that I would hate to lose. Like yahoo was in the early days, where I still have many longstanding friendships over 15 years, I have some similar value in twitter.
But with potential to get banned I actually donâ€™t trust twitter anymore and I donâ€™t want to invest more time to build it up the value of this network to me or my followers. Sadly it may mean those who rely on it to get notified of updates of my blog will be gone in a second if the happens.
To give some anonymous person that power over me who on a whim may decide to change a policy and cut me off would be unacceptable risk I should not take.

And consider the possibility that someone did not like what I was writing or a competitor somehow hacked my account then spammed intensely from so it got banned. With no recourse it would fatal.
I am sure I am alone as I am now getting quite cynical of social networks value anyway. To be honesty although I still tweet and interact quite a lot I have stopped following on twitter and just let it grow organically as it wants to.

Well done with the blog Alistair. I always enjoy it and I commend you for your generosity to share your valuable work.

Certainly it’s possible to create some software that would… over time… backup your tweets, your friends, your followers and most of the associated data. It would be easy to do it from now on; a bit more tricky perhaps to go back a long way in history to try and get very old tweets, etc… Not sure about that. It may actually be easy.

Sorry I can’t point to such a service, but I’m sure bits and pieces of it exist here and there, at least.

I have 5 accounts with twitter,only had them about a week, I looked one night and four of them were suspended, due to what they call irregular activity. Now one of the accounts is to make people aware of abandoned dogs, no money or donations asked for. The other three are linked to my websites, which I don’t really push that much, I answer peoples tweets, generally just talk, about things that are going on, no aggresive following. Good god I have only got about 200 followers in my first twitter account. Frankly there is no taboo subjects no profanity, or adult content, so I don’t know what the problem is. Some of the twitter accounts that I have seen are a disgrace, just pushing products, and one that I seen was pornagraphic.
So you tell me what have I done, but Iam stumped myself

Fiona,
I eventually managed to get my account unsuspended.
What I found is that Twitter doesn’t appear to have a formal procedure for finding and banning accounts. It just has various moderators who are just normal tweeters.
In my case I had followed a chap, and then unfollowed him a few days later as he didn’t follow back. This was all it took for him to class me as aggressively adding and unadding people and he banned me.

If I’d have not added him I’d never have been banned.

If you hadn’t done anything wrong then you should be able to get yourself unbanned. Just follow the procedure on Twitter.

The company I work for finally agreed to let me set us up on a full rout of social marketing. Much more complicated that I realized to try and set all this up at one time (as opposed to slowly and piecemeal for myself over the years). But I had our Twitter account set up and running for 2 days. Started following 1 other user — the Washington Post. I posted 3 times with some links to Education in the news. And my account was suspended. I’ve gone through the motions for 2 days since then and not even an acknowledgment.

OMG im crying because my twitter just got suspended for no reason anyone know how long it takes to get it back :'( please help for any advise really need it i followed al the procedures twitter gave to me

WTF!? My account just got suspended in the last hour, no reasons from Twitter why either. Does anybody have any ideas of how long suspension last, and if they are permanent? This is the worst thing ever 🙁

My twitter account was just suspended but no emails, no reasons. Twitter people are stupid, they don’t even warn before suspending accounts. In my first email from twitter they wrote “We have one suggestion: follow more people. Yes, more. Following is how you build your home timeline.”, I followed not more than 500 people in three days and they suspended my account, I don’t know why.

My twitter was also suspended last night. I emailed twitter several times and each time they said “your account has been restored”. But in fact, it was not restored and still suspended. Please help me, I worked hard to get my followers 🙁

My twitter account was suspended for “following” Aggressively, and it was suspended but after i went on twitter i just click the red popup saying i was suspended and filled in and In the end my twitter was un-suspended, and after It was all done it says I have 0 followers and 0 Following, what happend?